Finding My Passion

Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening. — Grit the Power of Passion and Perseverance Angela Duckworth

Passion Project ​

I started this blog because I wanted to show people how easy it is to use business analysis software to visualize data and generate insights. I love doing this and cannot help, but want to teach others how amazing and useful these tools are. But this blog is more than that. This blog is a passion project that provides me (and others on occasion) with a venue for ideas and opinions that interest me. I get to research anything I find interesting and share it with the world.

This is so different than my regular life. It seems like anytime people ask what my major is my response either makes their eyes glaze over or they quickly change the subject. I know that my passion for excel and analytics is different. Harvard Business Review called being a data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century, but the reality is that this is a job for hardcore numbers nerds. This blog is where my inner nerd can geek out and fangirl over awesome dashboards or surprising data trends.

Getting giddy over excel was not how I saw myself discovering my passion. I thought I wanted to be a robotics engineer. Dr. Crute, Executive Director of Grove City College Graduate Studies, recognized my analytical acumen and became my mentor. She hand-picked me to join her research and explore my passion outside of the classroom setting. This project exemplified the challenge of analytics; where the task is to understand the data to ascertain the story behind it. We were given survey data and asked to explore any useful trends.

Before I started this research project I had only used basic excel tools and had not encountered any other statistical software. I had an unorganized excel file full of disorganized data and no idea where to start. The drive to understand the story behind the data drew me in and challenged me to accumulate the technical knowledge I needed to evaluate the data.

Looking back, I have always embraced the challenge of extracting meaning out of chaos. As a young child, I remember examining a spare bedroom full of random boxes of photographs and realizing that the mess prevented me from enjoying the memories in the photographs. I then systematically developed a solution where I created a digital album with appropriate categories for my family members to access the photographs and reminisce about the memories they contain. This experience was invaluable. I had the opportunity to allow my curiosity to guide me and accumulated a lot of skills along the way.

As I reflect on my college career, my course work paired with my experiences has helped me create a strong foundation for the rest of my career, but more importantly, it has taught me that the learning has only just begun. I have acquired many skills during my undergraduate education and summer internships, but I realize that I have just scratched the surface of analytics tools. Someday I hope to attain either my MBA or a Masters of Analytics, but until then, I will continue developing my passion and researching analytics topics to share with all of you here in this blog.